It has been conventional practice particularly in the manufacture of linear material such as strands or groups of glass filaments or fibers to attenuate fine streams of glass into filaments or fibers by winding a group or strand of the glass filaments into a package on a rotating forming tube. As the glass streams and the filaments attenuated therefrom are extremely fine, fracture of the streams or the fine filaments is likely to occur periodically rendering the wound package incomplete or the filaments defective. Such incomplete or defective packages of strands or filaments are referred to as "break-outs".
The forming tubes upon which the groups of filaments or strands are wound may be of paper or of thin-walled molded plastic or resinous material.
Heretofore it has been a practice for an operator to separate the incomplete or defective packages from the complete packages and utilize a hand-held knife or tool to sever the group or strand of filaments from an incomplete or defective package in order that the forming tube, whether paper or plastic, may be reused in forming another package. The manual operation of cutting the strands or groups of filaments from a break-out package is very tedious and time consuming and adds considerable labor cost to the production of complete packages.